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• Phuong Mai Vegetarian - Ho Chi Minh City

I've just eaten in this place. I found this to be a reasonable positive experience. The point raised by other reviewers about the pro vegan signs in place being at odds with dishes listing (for example) butter as being among the ingredients. There's also pizza on sale and while it may well be that the cheese is vegan, there is no indication of such on what is a menu of a very extensive list of dishes. Similarly there's a lot of coffee on sale advertised as being with milk. There's no indication that the milk used is anything other than the default milk used (i.e. cow's) in any omnivorous eatery across this earth. Do the owners think mistakenly that the words vegan and vegetarian are synonymous? I don't know. Fortuitously when I hoovered in I did so with a Vietnamese and pictorial representation of what vegan is. The quietly pleasant waitress read the text and I tried to use the pictures to highlight the point about no milk products, no egg products, no honey. Her English is certainly way better than my Vietnamese. Whether the message successfully got through, I certainly can't make any guarantees. I wasn't overly hungry so I went for a papaya salad. This was nice enough. I also went for something I don't recall seeing before, namely fruit spring roll. This turned out to be very interesting. It came with an oil burner with a small underneath to the melt chocolate to be used as a dip. The bill came exactly to the 84 000 dong that I expected it to. There was no service charge. The decor of the place is quite nice. If though the manager is considering any sort of refurb, he needs to ring the HCMC branch of Walter Wall Carpet Fittings to get those completely worn out on the way to the kitchen & bathroom replaced. The sound track to the place was piano music of what seemed like familiar western songs ('country road take me home' was one I defo recognised). The piano playing seemed a little over done to me but what do I know (sod all probably). I didn't feel it added anything to the place. This is a trivial point though. Rating out of 5 for me is a spin up between 3 & 4.